Why I Have Not Been Blogging

Everything in my normal life stopped last Friday, and it is just starting to get back to normal. A 560-acre forest fire is not like all the tornadoes down South—for one thing, you can fight a forest fire to some extent—but it is a big disruption when it is close to your house—within half a mile, in our case.

After our evacuation order was canceled, and M. and I were back home, we started feeling the desire to clean everything. Not that it was smoked up, the house just felt grubby and messy after a long winter.

When I made my quick trip home on Saturday morning, the power was off, the house cool and dark,  shaded from the early morning sun by the ridge to the east. The previous morning’s dirty dishes were still on the counter, stuff was tossed around from our quick evacuation packing.

And so I though, “As soon as I get back here permanently, assuming that I do, it’s time to start paying attention to the house, the garden, and the physical plane in general.”

Of course, when we came home, it was snowing, but we’ll take all the moisture that we can get.

I do have some blog posts stored in my head and will be getting to them over the next three days. Then it’s festival time.

Practical Magic, a Blogging Roundup

• From Lupa at Therioshamanism, “How to Talk to Dead Things.” Dead animal things, that is.

• From Strategic Sorcery, on why setting goals is not the same as accomplishment.

• From Gangleri’s Grove, thoughts on working with ancestors and a ritual for “elevating” them.

• From Witchful Thinking, a reminder about the basics of Moon phases in practical magic.

Clickety clickety clickety DING!

It’s the end of an era.

I still have two machines, one out of the old Colorado Springs Free Press building, for which I paid $5. And another that I hold onto for sentimental reasons, because I bought it with the money from the first short story that ever sold, at age 17. (I think it was the only short story that I ever sold, for that matter.)

UPDATE: Apparently I—and a lot of other people—were suckered. It was just the one factory in India that closed. Typewriters are still being made elsewhere.

Gallimaufry with Book Porn

• “Interview, Chaos, Spiritual Machines, Circles, Readings, and Book Porn” at Plutonica.

• A Heathen-metal concert review at The Movement of Sound. (That is one genre you won’t hear on A Darker Shade of Pagan.)

• Anticipating a movie based on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods at The Witching Hour.

• Bo at The Cantos of Mvtabilitie lists favorite blogs, which must pass tests of both stylishness and spirituality.

The Higher-Ed Bubble

Talk of the “higher-education bubble” seems to be increasing. This short article from a North Carolina-based think tank  pretty well sums it up:

Like the nation’s housing bubble, which eventually burst, the college bubble is caused by a number of factors. But the biggest force is, as my colleague George Leef has often pointed out, the overselling of higher education. The housing bubble was created, at least in part, by the conviction that everyone ought to own a home; the college bubble is occurring because so many peoplebelieve that everyone ought to attend college.

It’s depressing because so many people whom I know are employed in higher education, want to be so employed, or are connected with it, such as through academic publishing.

Speaking of the United States, what is the figure for entering freshmen who actually complete a bachelor’s degree in a generous six years? Under 50 percent, right?

Yet every high-school guidance counselor tells kids that even if they take on a pile of debt to get a degree, they will earn it all back and more. Not always true.

I don’t think making university education dramatically cheaper is the answer either. Some countries do — and then they end up with large numbers of young people who are now “above” working with their hands.

So they get jobs in bloated government bureaucracies, sit around drinking tea and soliciting bribes — or they emigrate.

(I’ve heard enough horror stories from the international students, of whom my university has quite a few.)

After decades of growth, starting post-World War Two when university education was subsidized for returning servicemen, then when the Baby Boom went to college (1960s-1970s), and then the “bubble” years following those,  it is really hard to think that higher education might be contracting.

But it might. And we have to have some response to that, right?

This is Indo-European Music

Delhi 2 Dublin, playing and explaining panj-ab / Keltoi fusion music.

The 4C’s: Still Lost in Theory-Land

When I started teaching college writing classes (here meaning mainly rhetoric and composition) in the early 1990s,  I attended the national Conference on College Composition and Communication at least three times at university (i.e. taxpayer) expense.

One of them produced an early Letter from Hardscrabble Creek piece back when it was a column appearing in print: “A Pilgrimage to the Parthenon.” I was learning how to pursue my own agenda.

I did that because the “4C’s” conferences themselves increasingly bored me. They were full of grad-student-ese (“foregrounding the hegemony”) and the usual citations of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Paulo Freire.

I heard papers written in perfect, grammatical English about how students did not need grammar, etc. Were the authors part of a conspiracy to keep practical language skills down so that people like themselves could succeed? Or where they so far under the spell of Freire, etc.., that they neither practiced effective rhetoric themselves nor taught it to their students?

Attending the 4C’s, I learned a lot about university writing-teacher culture but much less about teaching writing to my students.

Apparently the 4C’s conferences are still the same, only more so, according to Mary Grabar, whose piece “Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years” is a reaction to her spending “four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta.”

She quotes a presenter  who is all too typical in my experience:

“We are bigger than comp/rhetoric. . . . We do language,” she declared to nods of agreement.  Because we do “critical analysis,” we occupy the most important position in the academy.  But her own comments and repeated references by others to Marxist theorist Paulo Freire, “post-capitalism,” and “Marxian” readings, betrayed her call for neutrality when teachers engage in classroom discussions of  “what is good for society.”  In bypassing the traditional modes of argument, teachers deny students the very tools necessary to make and  [any?] “critical analysis” of their teachers’ political objectives.

It is true that a  lot of university writing teachers want to teach “critical analysis,” and true that they often have politically desirable outcomes in mind. I saw that happen frequently. Not all are that way: the honest ones can appreciate (and fairly grade) an argument that runs counter to their own personal positions.

The second group, however, is  not that much represented at the 4Cs.

One problem is that the issues faced in the first and second-year composition classes don’t make for exciting conference papers. How does the student learn to paraphrase without plagiarizing? How does the student learn to intellectually evaluate difference sources? What sentence structure best reinforces a desired rhetorical effect?

But at the 4Cs, these bright, verbal products (increasingly) of graduate-level comp-rhet programs can set aside their huge stacks of papers to be graded and instead delight in deconstructing Facebook’s “colonized vision” or whatever, well-mixed with political group-think. Think of it as the scribal class at play.

Occultism and Mushrooms

Not necessarily psychotropic mushrooms. To learn more about them, read Andy Letcher’s Shroom or the works of Paul Stamets, Dale Pendell, etc.

These are metaphorical mushrooms—or mushrooms as metaphor—from an article by Wouter Hanegraaff on the German scholar of esotericism Will-Erich Peuckert (1895-1969):

To me, [Peuckert’s] book [Pansophie] breathed  an unmistakable mycological atmosphere: the mushrooms I used to collect during my trips through the forest, and the strange ideas and personalities that Peuckert had collected during his forays through the tangled woods of early modern history, simply “smelled” the same. The effect of the book had a lot to do with Peuckert’s inimitable prose … by which he introduced his readers to a forgotten world that seemed to be suffused with the same mysterious atmosphere of magic and fairy tales which, to me, had always given mushrooms their special attraction. Whereas green plants, trees and flowers flourish in broad daylight for all to see, mushrooms were half-hidden creatures of twilight, ambiguous and potentially poisonous plants-that-are-not-really-plants (what were they, really?) associated by popular tradition with the forbidden domains of magic and witchcraft. In short, mushrooms might be defined metaphorically as the occult in biology—and conversely, one could say that Peuckert now introduced me to what seemed like the mushrooms of history. Just as mushrooms grow in the autumn and are thus associated with decay and the decline of the life cycle, Peuckert described the magic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the final flowering of a grand worlview in decline, inevitably doomed to be dissolved by the rise of bourgeois culture.

Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Will-Erich Peukert and the Light of Nature,” in Esotericism, Religion, and Nature, ed. Arthur Versluis, et al. (Minneapolis: Association for the Study of Esotericism, 2010), 282-83.

Life as an Adjunct Professor

Yet another article on the turn toward academic part-timers. My wife spent twenty years as an adjunct, which on one level was OK with her, because the community college at which she mostly taught dumped hellish loads on their full-time instructors.

On the other hand, the pay was minimal: $600-900 per course. (Welcome to Colorado, where a view of the mountains is considered to be the equivalent of multiplying your wages by two.)

But it is not just the community colleges that rely on part-time faculty:

Even prestigious schools rely heavily on adjuncts, especially for teaching classes of freshmen and sophomores. At Harvard, adjuncts accounted for 57 percent of the faculty in 2005; at Boston University that year, they made up 70 percent. And over the last three decades, the number of adjuncts employed across the country skyrocketed by 210 percent while tenure-track faculty hirings rose merely 7 percent.

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“Unearthing Matriarchy”

The Innovations group blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education has a post titled “Unearthing Matriarchy,” about how the myth of peaceful ancient matriarchies became firmly entrenched (for a time) in Academia, in a way that biblical literalism never could—outside of a denominational college.

Writer Peter Wood points out that while someone who believed openly in literal seven-day creation of the Earth would have a hard time getting hired as a biology professor—and rightly so, in his opinion—a literal believer in the theories of Marija Gimbutas would have no such problem getting a job in a women’s studies department.

I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but it is a useful thought experiment. Why won’t higher education hold women’s studies to ordinary standards of historical accuracy? Because contemporary American higher education cares far more about protecting its favored group of political ideologies than it does its standards of rational inquiry and scrupulous use of evidence. The standards are cited most conspicuously when they lend themselves to fencing off members of disfavored groups. Why is higher education having such a hard time these days attracting public support? A good part of the reason is that it is so self-indulgent.

Maybe so.  Also, serious peaceful ancient matriarch-ists are tiny in numbers compared to biblical creationists. They do not turn up in state legislatures trying to thwart the teaching of evolution and the choice of school textbooks. They are invisible to the news media.  Having little political power outside Academia and para-Academia, they are treated more gently within its walls.

(Via Prof. Reynolds)